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Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, –∗

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Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, –∗ IRSH (), pp. – doi:./S © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, –∗ C LARE A NDERSON School of History, Politics and International Relations University of Leicester University Road, Leicester LERH, UK E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT: This article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period to . It con- siders the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is con- cerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extrac- tion that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant sub- jects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commod- ity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company’s port cities. ∗ The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/–)/ERC Grant Agreement . It draws on statistical work funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (R/RES---). I am grateful to the European Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, editors and contributing authors of this Special Issue, and participants in the “port cities” conference held at the University of Pittsburgh in . Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 26 Sep 2021 at 22:09:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859019000129 Clare Anderson INTRODUCTION On August , in Moulmein, the capital of British Burma, a gang of one hundred Indian convicts was engaged in its routine monthly task of loading coal onto the East India Company’s paddle steamer HC Tenasserim, at the docks of Mopoon. This ship was one of many that plied the Company’s trad- ing routes around the Bay of Bengal, connecting port cities in South and South East Asia. Like other Company steamers, the HC Tenasserim carried a diverse cargo. This included men, women, and children – Company offi- cials with their families and servants, merchants and traders, military officers and troops, and labourers – and trade goods like cotton, spices, pepper, opium, and betel nut. In common with other such vessels, the Tenasserim also routinely conveyed Indian transportation convicts into sentences of penal labour. Port cities like Moulmein, one such carceral site, were key loca- tions through and in which the Company repressed and put to work colo- nized populations. They were places in which convicts joined other colonial workers in the formation of a remarkably cosmopolitan labour force. The Moulmein convicts working in the docks of Mapoon had, in the early hours of the day, marched the three miles between their jail and the coal shed wharf. The deputy jailer, Mr Edwards, with twenty-six guards, had super- vised their work, with a half dozen armed reserve stationed a short distance away. As usual, the convicts were close to finishing the task by the early afternoon. But this was no ordinary day in Moulmein. Just as they were fin- ishing loading the boat, nineteen of the convicts grabbed three of the lascars (sailors) who were holding the ropes tethering the ship to the riverbank and threw them overboard. Their guards approached, but other convicts kept them back by pelting them with lumps of coal. The rest let go of the ropes and pushed the boat off. With Moulmein sitting at the southern confluence of the point at which the Salween River splits into four, they set sail north towards Martaban and got behind their oars, with both the wind and the flood tide in their favour. If port cities were places of convict repression and coerced labour, they were also always potential spaces of collective rebel- lion. Immediately, deputy jailer Edwards ordered a party to set off along the river in pursuit of the convicts. It quickly caught them up, for the coal boat was heavy, and managed to board the steamer and recapture the men. Despite the convicts’ capitulation, the reaction of the guards was brutal. They killed . The port cities were: Akyab, Kyouk Phyoo, Bassein, Rangoon, Moulmein, Amherst Town, Tavoy, and Mergui (Burma); Georgetown (Penang), Malacca Town, and Singapore; Diamond Harbour and Saugor Roads (Bengal); Fort St George and Chingleput (Madras); and Fort George and Tannah (Bombay). Until their transfer to the Dutch in exchange for Malacca follow- ing the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of , Amboyna and Bencoolen (Fort Marlborough) were also included in this circuit. Note that the capital of British Burma shifted to Rangoon following the Second Anglo-Burmese War of . Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40, on 26 Sep 2021 at 22:09:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859019000129 Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia three men, and wounded eleven, who suffered dreadful and multiple injuries, including sabre wounds, fractured skulls, and broken legs. The convicts’ transportation to Burma, their work at the coal shed, their collective act of resistance, and the extreme violence countered against it raise key themes with respect to Asian convict workers. This article will explore the origins of Indian penal transportation in the context of earlier and concurrent metropolitan practice in Britain’s Atlantic world and Australian colonies, the interconnection between convictism and enslave- ment, and the repressive policies enacted by the East India Company in response to subaltern resistance to its expropriation of land and other resources in the Indian subcontinent. It will trace convict journeys across the Bay of Bengal, and further afield in the Indian Ocean, and discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in penal locations, notably the labour that they performed in port cities and their relationships with other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was one element of a connected imperial repertoire of repression, coerced labour extraction, and the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying a malleable labour force to build the commodity chains and infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of imperial port city nodes, with each other and their hinterlands. Depending on the availability of labour locally, as well as changing ideas about ideal forms of punishment and rehabilitation emanating from metropolitan Europe and Australia, convicts sometimes worked in parallel with other workers, includ- ing slaves, lascars, migrants, and locally convicted prisoners. Paradoxically, though the Company deployed penal transportation as a means of quashing rebellion and resistance, the close confinement and asso- ciation of convicts during their often long journeys to ports of departure and ports of arrival, over land, and by river steamers and sailing ships, rendered transportation a vector for their spread. Transportation thus enabled convicts to develop transregional political solidarities, and as such was productive of violent and collective anti-Company uprisings. It is now widely recognized that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, port cities in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean were places of cosmopolitan interaction, the economic and social meeting places of Asian sojourners and settlers, in which both friction could arise and syncretic cultural and political solidarities could form. What is perhaps less appreciated is the extent and importance of . British Library, India Office records [hereafter, IOR] P//: A. Bogle, commissioner Tenasserim provinces to J.P. Grant, secretary to government Bengal judicial department, August , enc. J.P. Briggs, magistrate of Moulmein, to Bogle, August . Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge, ), especially the introduction and ch. ; Mark Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimension in Colombo, –”, Modern Asian Studies, : Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.40,
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